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Becoming a wholly owned Sabre Holdings company sets the stage for growth.
In April, Sabre Holdings acquired the 30 percent of Travelocity shares it didn’t already own. Now, leveraging the assets of the Sabre Holdings portfolio, Travelocity is moving quickly to address market opportunities and develop technologies that are expected to accelerate revenue and earnings growth rates.
Site59 Acquisition
Travelocity’s “merchant model” capabilities were enhanced significantly with the acquisition of Site59.com, Inc., a leading online seller of last-minute travel inventory from airlines, hotels and rental car companies. Site59 brings two key strengths to Travelocity:
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New capabilities in last-minute packaging and access to content, providing Travelocity members more opportunities to take advantage of great travel deals. |
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Long-term agreements with numerous hotel chains, providing discounted room inventory that Travelocity can resell as a merchant – and earn margins that are higher than typical commissions on room sales. |
Merchant Model Hotel Program
In October, Travelocity launched a revolutionary merchant model hotel program – offering advantages so compelling that more than 2,000 hotels signed agreements to participate during the program’s first 10 weeks of availability.
Travelocity’s hotel partners are finding many features about the offering attractive:
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Industry-leading technology lets Travelocity pull rates and availability directly from the hotel’s central reservations system. This eliminates the time and costs associated with manually allocating blocks of rooms to a separate system for discounted sales. Travelocity can provide a “single view” of room inventory, thereby giving hotel partners much more flexibility in their resale activities than they get from Travelocity’s merchant model competitors. |
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Travelocity pays the hotels immediately upon check-out – eliminating the 60- or 90-day wait for payment that hotels experience with other merchant model distributors. |
New Air Shopping Technology
Already the leader in air shopping and pricing capabilities, Travelocity introduced a new air shopping engine in the fourth quarter of 2002 – called P3 because of the additional precision, power and price capabilities it offers online travel shoppers. The P3 technology gives consumers more meaningful choices when they’re shopping for airline tickets online – allowing them to consider airport location, departure time, airline and other preferences. It also provides a more comprehensive display – returning up to 31 different fares per search, compared to nine previously. And it enhances Travelocity’s “low fare finding” capability by including Web fares and other merchant model options in every search. |
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